Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with the World Wide Web pages on the Internet.
The Internet is the largest network of computer systems in the world. Technically, it's the global network that connects huge numbers of networks to one another. The Internet was initially implemented by the government as a network of military computers, defense contractors, and universities performing defense research. The original agency in charge of the Internet was the Advanced Research Procurement Agency (ARPA) and the network became known as the ARPANET. It mainly allowed sharing of information in the research being performed between the various sites, but also gave the government a means to research communication security and integrity in conditions like atomic attacks and associated electromagnetic effects. However, the Internet has evolved from a primarily defense oriented network, to a multipurpose network that connects almost every other kind of computer to the original ARPANET, and thus defining the Internet.
Currently, the Internet links together the massive online service bureaus, such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online. It also links together hundreds of thousands of universities, government agencies, and corporations located in almost a hundred countries around the world. It reaches out to small offices, school rooms, and even individual homes. According to the Internet Society (ISOC), the net reached nearly five million host computers and twenty five million users in 1994. Those numbers have seen a steady doubling every year since 1983. However, many other sources doubt those numbers and state that nobody really knows how big the Internet is.
From the user's perspective, the Internet is a truly massive resource of services. This network gives you access to the world's largest online source of reference information, publicly distributed software, and discussion groups, covering virtually every topic one could reasonably imagine and an embarrassingly high number of topics that one could not. A subsection of the information contained by the computers on the Internet is called the World Wide Web (heretofore known as WWW or Web). The Web consists of s system of information sites that connect through a series of hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow a user to either point and click at a highlighted hyperlink (a highlighted hyperlink could be either text or a graphic) or enter a number corresponding to the highlighted link. Activating the highlighted hyperlink will access either another site, an audio clip, a video clip, a graphic, text based information or other types multi-media information being developed everyday.
This almost unlimited amount of information is very hard to digest without some sort of organization. A common software tool to organize the vast amount of information is called a “browser”. This common software tool utilizes a common programming language that define hyperlinks and the other information presented on the screen. The common programming language is called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) (Hypertext is commonly referred to mean any hyperlink to multi-media information and will heretofore be interchangeable with hyperlink). There are several browsers being used for the World Wide Web. The National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) has contributed to a browser called NCSA Mosaic and is probably the most widely used browser at the present time. Other browsers have been developed by software companies and/or online service providers (e.g. Netscape, America Online, . . . ).